"We’re not advocating that a company change a working system," says [Intel’s Chief E-Strategist Chris] Thomas. "What we are saying is that where you have manual processes that are delaying or incurring errors, the automation makes sense. EDI is too expensive to throw at a lot of these problems. But XML and proprietary standards and schema are not, especially as new products like BizTalk server and the like become available."

"Every six months over 30% of your address book entries become out-of-date. People get promoted, change jobs, change phone numbers and get new email addresses. CardScan’s new AccuCard Service will track and present updates for your consideration. Now your address book can always contain the latest information."

This service comes with a business card scanner, and looks like a clever way to get more (lasting) value from an analog-to-digital conversion.

"The core of the Kenamea offering is the Kenamea Application Network, which routes message traffic between back-end enterprise applications and end-user front-end applications. The type of data transferred in a message is left entirely to the application developer: messages might contain XML documents in one application, SOAP messages in another, and binary data in a third."

"[The Office XP Web Services Toolkit] gives developers and corporate users the ability to search out multiple Web services from across the Internet and integrate them within the tool kit’s development environment. Developers will also be able to cobble together applications from those Web services within the Microsoft Office environment."

"The phone keypad is an ergonomic disaster for entering long messages. But with new wireless devices with keyboards coming out this year, such as the Danger hiptop, GSM GPRS pagers from Research in Motion, and pager/phones from Motorola, it will be interesting to see if the Weblog phenomenon helps spark greater use of SMS."

Voice recognition could ease phone-to-blog interfaces, though these posts might sound, er, I mean, not always, you know, as properly written as they should.

"A week after question and answer search engine Ask Jeeves finished embedding the assets of Teoma, the company says it has acquired the technology of privately owned Octopus for an undisclosed amount."

"One way to develop powerful VoiceXML applications is to leverage existing Web applications by simulating a Web browser and scraping the results via a programmable HTTP Web agent. This example allows users to track a Federal Express package, using the fedex.com Web site."

It dawned on many people that phones are best at voice, not keyboard input. So enabling web apps through voice control makes sense as far as usability is concerned.